


All Sour and Sweet

by theoldgods



Category: Doctor Who, Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: Christmas, Doctor Who Christmas Special, F/M, Height Differences, Jelly Babies, Kissing, Season/Series 08, Snow, Speculation
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-11-15
Updated: 2014-11-15
Packaged: 2018-02-25 10:30:02
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,995
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2618543
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/theoldgods/pseuds/theoldgods
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>On the list of weird things that can happen to Clara Oswald, Father Christmas landing on her roof is actually not the strangest. What's disconcerting is the idea that the strangest thing that can happen to her and the Doctor involves attempting to tell the truth.</p><p>Or: "holy shit, that Christmas special teaser; you two need to stop."</p>
            </blockquote>





	All Sour and Sweet

**Author's Note:**

  * For [orysbaratheon (kinginthenarrowsea)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/kinginthenarrowsea/gifts).



> Based off of the 2-minute sneak peak of the 2014 Christmas special that aired during Children in Need. Spoilers for all of season 8, including "Dark Water"/"Death in Heaven." I've tried my best with Britishisms, but this wasn't Brit-picked--minor corrections on that point welcome.

Father Christmas on her roof is, in fact, not the strangest part of Clara’s night. Nor, for the record, is the TARDIS materializing in the snow, nor the Doctor emerging like from it like a wraith--all black, grey, and white, so wholly part of the moment in a way he hasn’t been since his regeneration. What’s the strangest part is the way in which, as the TARDIS door closes behind her, she feels on edge in a way she hasn’t since they parted ways.

It’s not the usual adrenaline rush, and perhaps that’s the problem; the Doctor and the TARDIS are usually an exposed wire in her subconscious, something that pushes her forward, keeps her alive in a way alien to anything bound to this earth and time. The lead in her stomach is _not_ the Doctor-- _please don’t be the Doctor, please no, please, that’s wrong_ , she thinks as she leans back against the door. If she’s lost her joy for him, if not even _he_ can make her feel the extremities of her skin, the way the blood pounds through each individual vein, then she will probably never find that rush again.

The TARDIS looks exactly the same inside as she remembers, and the dread that observation gives her is another problem. She should be happy, surely, that nothing has changed, that she can just pick up weeks later where she left off. But if he had been to Gallifrey and back, surely it would be different--there would be some sign that man and box had been _home_ , had been rejuvenated by some ancestral fountain of Time Lord youth.

The other half of the door opening does startle her, so that Clara’s not quite sure whether she feels more relief at the reappearance of the Doctor or at her ability to feel relief itself. He remains all shadows even in the bright lights of the TARDIS, his face drawn back in on itself. Snow glitters on the door as he slams back against it, dampened hair bobbing. Clara focuses on his Adam’s apple for a moment, not sure where else to look.

“How’s Danny?”

His eyes are closed, so he can’t tell what her reaction is to such a question. That’s all very well--Clara does not know what her reaction _should_ be. Her instincts for the past weeks have been limited knowing when to sleep, when to piss, and when to eat, in no particular order. Everything else--arranging to send Danny’s boy back to his family, arranging further memorial services, arranging to look as human as possible in most of the ways that matter--has been finely calculated in a way that makes even the most controlling part of her gape a little in wonder, when she has the fleeting capability for self-reflection.

Watching the Doctor’s closed eyelids flutter makes Clara’s heart beat faster--an encouraging sign, surely, a note that something can still happen instinctively, that she has exposed wires and nerves still. It makes her want to tell him the truth, something that’s been in short supply lately.

 _Danny stayed_ , she says. Silently. As a warm up to saying it out loud, surely. _UNIT and I have been trying to figure out how to legally erase the death of a child who doesn’t speak English. Kate is the only person who knows that what I need most of all is a kick, preferably some sort of electrocution. A TARDIS translation matrix would be useful, as would time travel and you being an arse next to me._

“Probably about the same as Gallifrey.”

It’s a guess, borne of her inability to tell him anything that actually matters and the suspicion she’s been turning over in her head the past few weeks, that he might have the same affliction. She didn’t _really_ expect that Gallifrey would turn those who touched it into gold or turn him back into a floppy-haired twelve-year-old with a bowtie, but in a world where Father Christmas jumps around on your roof and police boxes transcend the time-space continuum, anything is possible. Except, apparently, speaking her feelings to an alien with two hearts.

“That’s good,” he murmurs, opening his eyes and standing up straight once more. His hands are vibrating-- _trembling_ , she’d say, if she didn’t know that it was pretty much impossible for the Doctor to do anything like tremble. She’s had those hands wrapped around hers a few times in her life and never found them anything less than steady.

She’d never thought she would actually see them again.

That _was_ what the whole bit at the end had been, hadn’t it? Admitting that he made her feel special--practically “I love you, please don’t let me let you go” for a pair of compulsive liars. Deciding afterward that, regardless of what happened, space travel was a danger and a drug she should probably wean herself off of, before she made any other Danny Pinks out of the people in her life. Time and space required more than one heart to travel, apparently, and hers was worn clean through.

“Why are you here?” she asks as he crosses to the console, shaking the remnants of snow from his hair and the strange black robe-like things he is wearing. “I said goodbye to you.”

“And yet got straight on board again with only a few squirrely looks at me at my slightest request, didn’t you?”

“You’re doing that _thing_ again, where you assume you’re the one of us who’s in control, aren’t you?” She has, she realizes dimly, another instinct she’d forgotten during the days of automatic pilot: arguing with the Doctor. “Because you have a big box and the whole wide world to roam through, because you never have to stay anywhere you don’t want to.”

He laughs as the TARDIS engines rev. “I’m here, aren’t I?”

Color is coming back to her cheeks and her slushy, frozen feet. Something is _buzzing_ , even only momentarily, along her spine. “What is it you don’t like, then? Earth? Christmas? Snow? Elves?” She swallows before adding the last: “Me?”

“Liars,” he whispers, in a tone just audible over the engines.

Clara takes a breath, one that’s surprisingly steady considering the (wonderful, dreaded, _alive_ ) twists her stomach’s doing. “So me. And you.”

The Doctor’s hands finally stop trembling, frozen as they are along with the rest of him. He turns toward her, blue eyes flashing.

“I was thinkin’ more elves and Father Christmases who aren’t at all what they say they are,” he mutters, wobbling against the motion of the TARDIS as he walks toward her, “but if you’ve something to confess, Miss Clara--”

“You first.”

 _God_ , this feels good. How long has it been since she thought that anything _felt good_? Since Danny’s first death? Before? The answer that eventually comes to mind is _Probably since the last time you argued with the Doctor_ , and she does not immediately throw that aside. This electricity coming back is too fragile and yet too welcome to throw anything away at the moment.

He looms over her, gray-white hair standing on end, a snowflake balancing precariously on his left eyebrow. She brushes it away as he answers.

“Where do I begin? The things I’ve lied about would turn your hair gray.”

“I’d say the same”--her voice is so tittery, stupidly light and happy considering how not three minutes before she was a leaden rock with a dead boyfriend freezing in the slush on a rooftop--“but I think it’s too late for that.”

She means to kiss his eyebrow, the sort of warm, patronizing gesture you give to a child. It would be a good way of exerting control, probably, or at least entertaining her, in this moment she has of forgetting what absolute shit her life has been lately. She has to stand on her tiptoes to do so, however, and in the time that takes, the Doctor shifts. Her lips make contact with his lips instead.

Clara knows that kissing the Doctor is a crap idea even as she’s doing it--he is however many millennia old and a lying prick to boot. What’s more, she does not even feel happy electric jolts in her stomach, or nervous horror, or much of anything--that she can analyse her feelings so closely is a good sign that this isn’t a blissful kiss of love. His lips are dry and cold and open in a round “o” of surprise; their teeth bash together and she tastes whatever it was he last ate--jelly babies, at a guess. The TARDIS comes to a halt that jerks them apart.

“This is tremendously awkward,” the Doctor murmurs, drawing his hands up to cup her face. They remain only centimeters apart nonetheless. “Yet tremendously delicious, in a nonsexual way. Your breath tastes like peppermint. And lies.”

She chokes back a laugh as his thumb strokes her cheek. “What flavor jelly baby were you eating?”

“They have flavors? I just like them because I like to crush tiny humans between my teeth.”

Clara bites his lip, just hard enough to prick. _Nonsexually. Because he’s an arse_ , she tells herself, letting her tongue touch faint patches of sugar in his mouth. _Very nonsexually_. When their lips meet again, it’s more softly, naturally, and they linger there for several heartbeats as a shiver rolls up her spine. She leans her forehead into his and lets him massage her neck; they remain frozen in place, fitting one against the other, long after they break the kiss. A sniffle or two echoes in the silence settling around them as Clara falls back down onto flat feet, sliding her head under his chin.

“My girl,” the Doctor whispers. His voice is deep and ragged in her ear, and she does not try to categorize the lurch in her stomach further than “pleasant, very.” With a hand against his chest she can feel two heartbeats, fluttering out of sync with one another against her fingertips.

Eventually Clara draws away, in part because her own heart can only take so much upheaval in one day and in part because she remembers what he said the last time they touched one another. They are, after all, compulsive liars with words, but she finds herself thinking that maybe she can start trying not to hide her face from him.

_And if that means physical contact with your faces instead of hiding them?_

That is a stupid thought, she knows at once. She wants the Doctor for adventures and escapism, for the way in which he makes her feel occasionally brave and occasionally tremendously afraid, for the entire bloody universe he can show to her and the inappropriate laughing they’ll do along the way. She does not want his jelly-baby mouth, although she could get used to burying her body close against the bank of heat he exudes and feeling the rhythm of two hearts instead of one under her touch.

“Lemon,” she tells him, keeping hold of his hand and willing her eyes to stay on his face. When he cocks an eyebrow, she continues, “You taste of lemon jelly babies and lies, all sour and sweet.”

“Fitting.” The Doctor clears his throat. “Go put on some proper clothes, my little liar. We’ve got a damned Christmas mystery to figure out.”

Clara backs toward the wardrobe, still not daring to look away from him. “And some conversations to have, I reckon.”

“Those too. I’ll even show you Gallifrey.” He sighs. “It won’t take long.”

She should not feel happy about this, about the fact that, by the looks of it, Missy lied to and destroyed him as much as she herself has. She should not feel happy about the fact that she’s probably going to have to someday explicitly say that Danny is dead. She smiles nonetheless as she heads into the wardrobe, licking the faint taste of lemon from her lips.


End file.
